Baking Christmas Cookies

It’s that time of year, time to bake Christmas Cookies. We invited Chief’s best friend Hadley Girl over to join us and they had a blast.

Our Recipes

We didn’t do anything to crazy, I use a Chewy Sugar Cookie Recipe I found while googling. It was super duper simple and easy to make. The longest part was waiting for the dough to get cold so we could roll it out and cut them into shapes with the cookie cutters.

I also made my own version of homemade butter cream frosting. It is so easy to make and taste so much better then store bought frosting. Here is the recipe for that.

Buttercream Frosting

1 stick of softened butter (Not melted)

1 cup of powdered sugar

1-2 teaspoons of Vanilla Extract (Depending on how much vanilla you like)

1-2 tablespoons of Milk

Food Coloring Gel (Optional)

Cream your butter till it is a smooth consistency about 1 minute, add Vanilla extract and mix. Then add in 1/2 cup powdered sugar mixing until combined, add in the other 1/2 cup of powdered sugar. This is where you will see the need for the milk. Add in 1 tablespoon first and mix, adding more milk as needed until you get the consistency you desire. Add in food coloring gel and mix till you reach the desired color (Optional).

Refrigerate after making.

Mixing our dough

The kids had a blast with this. I remeasured the dry ingredients so they could help pour them into the mixer, and to help keep the mess to a minimum. Chief cracked the egg and was super proud. This is a task we have been working on for about a year now, and he seems to have it mastered.

After mixing our dough we rolled it up in some plastic and put it in the freezer to get cold and solid. This step is super important to prevent your dough from spreading out while baking. While it was freezing the mom’s make some of their own secret peppermint bark to hide for later(Recipe below)

Cutting our Cookies

By the time we reached this step the kids were bored and didn’t want anything to do with us anymore. Typical for 3 year olds. They found the play dough and were happily making their own creations in the classroom.

I sprinkled flour onto a wooden cutting board, and rolled out the dough to be about 1/4 inch thick. We used traditional cookie cutters, the snowman, stocking, gingerbread boy and girl, and christmas trees. Because they were only about 1/4 inch thick they baked in about 10 minutes.

Decorating our Cookies

Finally! The time came. They were out of the oven, flash cooled (Put in the freezer for 10 minutes) and ready to decorate. We called in the kids from the play room, got them washed up and they sat at the table ready to create their masterpiece cookies.

I placed out our homemade buttercream frosting, that I split into 3 containers and dyed red, green, and I left one white.They also got a small cup of sprinkles, because lets be real no child should have a full bottle of sprinkles, hahaha.

We had green teeth, red teeth, and sugar rushes galore. But we had two very happy children. It didn’t take long after they decorated the cookies for them to devour the frosting off, and eat their cookies.

Baking cookies has always been a Christmas tradition in my family and is one that I want to keep going with Chief. Being that part of our family is a few hundred miles away, we invited our best friends who have become our family to join us for this special day. I can’t be any happier with how the day went, and the time that we got to spend with Hadley Girl, baby Squish and Momma Nikki.

These days show me that you don’t have to be blood related to be a family. You can create family traditions with anyone, and make them special. Plus, Nikki and I use any excuse we can to get together and have some mom time ❤️.